Father and Son by
Edmund Gosse is an account of the author’s difficult relationship with his
father, the distinguished Natural Historian Philip Henry Gosse. It is regarded
by many as an important work of English literature, despite Edmund’s reputation
for inaccuracy, and is available as a Penguin Classic. The different
personalities, and beliefs, of the two men caused a rift between them, but Edmund
acknowledges that there was a time when they were very close.
After the death of his wife, Emily, in 1857, Henry Gosse
moved to Torquay with Edmund on 23rd September, two days after the boy’s eighth
birthday. They lived in a new villa, named Sandhurst,
and this had the advantage of being close to the sea and in an area with which Henry
had become familiar on previous visits. If the grief of bereavement wasn’t
enough to bear, there was also the hostile response to Henry’s book Omphalos, published in November 1857.
This was an attempt to reconcile the developing ideas of geological time scales
with the account of Creation in the book of Genesis in The Holy Bible, and it pleased neither the religious, or scientific,
communities. It is little wonder that the two were drawn closely together and
they spent much time collecting animals along the shore, many of which were
brought back to Sandhurst and kept in
tanks. As Ann Thwaite writes in her biography of Edmund [1]:
Day after day,..the middle-aged
widower and the small boy combed the rock pools at Anstey’s Cove, at Oddicombe,
at Petit Tor, or took longer excursions to Maiden Combe northwards or Livermead
to the south. Edmund was ‘his constant and generally his only companion’.
When Henry was away from Torquay giving lectures, there was
a loving correspondence between them, with hugs and kisses sent by both [2].
Then, on Henry’s return, the visits to the shore could re-commence. Once
material had been collected, Henry became absorbed in studying them and in
making illustrations that would lead to further books. While Henry was busy,
Edmund used a small room at the top of the house as his own “study”. He
modelled himself on his father and this is what he wrote [3]:
I, the son of a man who looked
through a microscope and painted what he saw there, would fain observe for
myself, and paint my observations. It did not follow, alas! that I was built to
be a miniature-painter or a savant, but the activity of a childish intelligence
was shown by my desire to copy the results of such energy as I saw nearest at
hand.
In the secular direction, this
now took the form of my preparing little monographs on seaside creatures, which
were arranged, tabulated and divided as exactly as possible on the pattern of
those which my Father was composing for his Actinologica
Brittanica. I wrote these out upon sheets of paper of the same size as his
printed page, and I adorned them with water-colour plates, meant to emulate his
precise and exquisite illustrations. One or two of these ludicrous pastiches
are still preserved, and in glancing at them now I wonder, not at any skill
that they possess, but at the perseverance and the patience, the evidence of
close and persistent labour. I was not set to these tasks by my Father, who, in
fact, did not much approve of them. He was touched, too, with the ‘originality’
heresy, and exhorted me not to copy him, but to go out into the garden or the
shore and describe something new, in a new way. That was quite impossible; I
possessed no initiative. But I can now well understand why my Father, very
indulgently and good-temperedly, deprecated these exercises of mine. They took
up, and, as he might well think, wasted, an enormous quantity of time; and they
were, moreover, parodies, rather than imitations, of his writings,..
Of these efforts by Edmund, Ann Thwaite writes [2]:
It was his greatest pleasure to
imitate his father and produce little learned treatises of his own. They were for his father, as is obvious in one of
his booklets on butterflies, written and illustrated when he was ten. Under the
‘Green veined White’ he has written: ‘It is common in most places in England,
and has been taken in Newfoundland, (by yourself), Europe generally and
Siberia.’
While examining the collection of art works by Henry Gosse
held by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, Holly Morgenroth and I discovered
one of the sheets of butterfly illustrations made by Edmund (see above). On the
reverse, several of the butterflies are named in Edmund's handwriting and, at
the bottom of the sheet, Henry wrote “By EWG in the spring of 1859”, so we know
that Edmund was 9½ years old when the
illustrations were made. They
copy the style of unpublished work by Henry Gosse in Entomologia Terra Novae [4], a page from which is shown below. Henry
made these paintings in 1833, when he was 23 years old, and they show well his
accuracy and love of settings, in this case vegetation. Edmund is likely to
have seen these illustrations and they probably formed the basis for his own efforts.
Did Henry label, and keep, the sheet by Edmund because it reminded him of his
early days, despite his reservations about its quality?
When looking at Edmund’s illustrations in the Museum in
Exeter, it was impossible not to feel close to the story of Henry and Edmund in
the late 1850s. In October 1859, Edmund was baptised as a member of the
Brethren, fulfilling the last wish of his mother and an ever-present wish of his father, both being devout
believers. In many ways, this marked a turning point, for it was the rigidity
of Henry’s Christian faith, together with developing personality differences,
that began the breakdown of the relationship between father and son. The sheet
that Holly and I found in the Gosse collection at RAMM is a memento of an
earlier, warmly affectionate, time and it is painful to know what was to come.
[1] Ann Thwaite (1984) Edmund
Gosse: A Literary Landscape. London, Secker and Warburg.
[2] Ann Thwaite (2002) Glimpses
of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse 1810-1888. London, Faber
and Faber.
[3] Edmund Gosse (1907) Father
and Son: A Study Of Two Temperaments. London, William Heinemann.
The illustration of the sheet by Edmund Gosse is reproduced
with permission. ©The Royal Albert
Memorial Museum, Exeter. Thanks to Holly Morgenroth, the Curator of Natural
History, for letting me see the works by Henry and Edmund Gosse that led to this blog post.
